It didn’t take long. We weren’t a minute into Ella McCay when the onscreen narrator (Julie Kavner) tells us about the title character, “I’m nuts about her.” That’s when I felt my poor heart sinking past my stomach and bowels to someplace near my anal cavity.
This comedy is by James L. Brooks, who loves his characters and wants us to love them too. That’s the problem. That has always been the problem. Decades before Netflix and its competitors were making low-wattage comedies about white people who live in nice houses going through low-stakes crises, Brooks was doing them and winning Oscars for the likes of Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News. Maybe that’s why his movies have shown precious little sign of artistic evolution. They’re so determined not to offend anyone that they inevitably make me really, really angry, and this movie is no exception.
Emma Mackey portrays the titular Ella, who starts out as a lieutenant governor of whatever state this is happening in — the weather seems to be cold, that’s what I can give you. At the tender age of 34, she then inherits the top job after her predecessor (Albert Brooks) leaves to become the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. The movie follows her during all three days of her governorship, during which she makes history.
The film is set in 2008, when “we all still liked each other,” as the narrator puts it. I’m not sure what America Brooks was living in back then, because I remember a flood tide of racism that still hasn’t abated. While the time period does effectively prevent us from having to deal with Ella or her boss running on white resentment, it’s also another piece of evidence that this filmmaker is stuck in the past.
At 110 minutes, this movie is way too long. Having Mackey play her character’s teenage self in flashbacks is a mistake, and the entire subplot with Ella’s younger brother (Spike Fearn), who keeps insisting he’s not agoraphobic even though he hasn’t left his house in a year, could have been cut. The guy really needs a therapist, but instead he’s cured after he gets a girlfriend (Ayo Edebiri), which is insulting to therapists and agoraphobes and everyone suffering from a mental condition and me.
The scenes just go on and on because everybody has one last thing to say, and even Ella’s dad’s new girlfriend (voiced by Tracey Ullman) leaves endless voice mail messages preaching the importance of forgiveness. Much like Ella — who wears out her staffers by holding hours-long meetings and talking in policy points — Brooks seems aware of his tendency to use too many words while also being powerless to do anything about it. Compare this to other comedies like Materialists or Splitsville or even the certifiably insane Regretting You, and the pacing of Ella McCay is downright geriatric, which can’t be chalked up to Brooks getting older, because his movies were this way even back in the 1980s.
The main character’s name is similar to the British lead actress’, but if there’s some personal quality about Mackey (who has been much better elsewhere) that has sparked the role, we see none of it here. The muck ensnares her and just about everyone else here: Jamie Lee Curtis as the aunt who raised Ella, Rebecca Hall as her cheated-on mother, and Kumail Nanjiani as the state trooper responsible for Ella’s personal security.
The only exception is Jack Lowden as Ella’s pizzeria-owning husband, who turns into a whiny little bitch and takes a sledgehammer to his wife’s career because he can’t stand her being more successful than him. The Englishman plays this part so well that you may feel sorry for Saoirse Ronan for being married to him in real life. (Don’t feel bad for her: He’s just a really good actor.) I’m glad at least that Ella doesn’t forgive him or her serial adulterer dad (Woody Harrelson) and shows us that her niceness has its limits.
Besides the movie’s poster, which shows Ella adjusting her shoe, the best thing about this film is the climactic sequence, when Ella squeezes out of a scandal created by her husband by recognizing how much leverage she has and using it to pass important legislation before she resigns. Film schools always tell aspiring screenwriters to show rather than tell, and Brooks could have just shown us his main character being awesome, but he couldn’t resist telling us about it, too. Maybe if Ella McCay didn’t insist on Ella being so gosh-darned adorable (and if the jokes had been funnier), this might have been the political comedy we needed. But then that probably would have required a new director and maybe a new cast.
Ella McCay
Starring Emma Mackey and Jamie Lee Curtis. Written and directed by James L. Brooks. Rated PG-13.
